Times
of India: Lucknow: Saturday, 18 April 2015.
The Lucknow
Municipal Corporation has decided to use the Right to Information Act to check
red-tapism in its departments. The corporation will hold workshops to train
people in drafting RTI applications to extract information from its
departments. The workshops are expected to begin next month.
The LMC will
also install a software to segregate department-wise pending RTI queries and
their status. This will ensure speedy replies to questions. The software will
be monitored daily by the LMC's public information officer to track the status
of RTIs in each department. The decision was taken after it was found that LMC
departments either give unsatisfactory or evade replies on RTI queries.
The problem
could be gauged from the fact the State Information Commission had to hold a
special session recently to dispose off appeals filed by people against LMC's sluggish
response to RTIs.
Additional
municipal commissioner PK Srivastava said, "People often ask vague,
inappropriate or too many questions in an RTI. This confuses authorities as RTI
application has to pass through more than one department. This results in poor
and delayed response."
LMC's
functioning is segregated under 24-25 departments. If an RTI carries questions
related to many departments, the letter often gets misplaced among them. On an
average, LMC receives 20-30 RTIs daily, out of which 20% cases usually remain
unattended.
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